With the development of video coding and decoding technologies and network technologies, streaming media technologies are used widely. For example, a user may preview a type of films or other video clips in a manner such as “on demand,” and in this way, multiple downsized video clips need to be displayed on a terminal at the same time. A direct solution is that the terminal acquires multiple streams corresponding to the video clips from a server, decodes the streams and plays the streams in corresponding positions.
Currently, a processor used in a handheld terminal or a non-personal computer (non-PC) terminal usually adopts hardware decoding, that is, a hardware decoding core is embedded in a processor. However, not all processors support multistream decoding. In chips supporting the multistream decoding, most of the chips handle the problem by using a method of time division, that is, multiple streams are decoded at the same time in a manner of adopting time division in a decoding core, for example, PowerVR graphic core series. However, when the manner of the time division is used, a switchover between decoding processes of the streams is required, thereby resulting in a loss of decoding performance and meanwhile increasing additional control logics.